RN-Ready

Saturday

Jan 26, 2013 at 6:00 AMJan 28, 2013 at 9:24 PM

By Jackie SmithMcDonough County Voice

EDITOR'S NOTE: A story published Jan. 12 localized the national nursing shortage from the perspective of Macomb geriatric facilities. This is a followup, examining the same issue from the view of RN students.

While rural communities across the country continue to face intense challenges filling nursing staffs, some say such a shortage may culminate a very different impact locally with two nursing schools nearby.

Wanda Foster is vice president chief nursing officer at McDonough District Hospital — one of several facilities in Macomb and the region to host clinical studies for nursing students from both Spoon River College and Western Illinois University. They're partnerships, she said, that have proven to be "a very big asset."

"The fact that we have two outstanding programs right here in Macomb helps insulate us from the shortage that other areas might feel," she said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Every year, Foster said she looks at long-range trends to project how many graduates or new registered nurses MDH can hire — it's a balance not to hire too many, but enough — appropriately as patient volume shifts.

But evidence of a perpetuated nursing shortage could be something RN students themselves see at the very root of their day-to-day academic and clinical education.

"Nursing is a very hard field to get into," first-year RN student Jessica Jackson said recently. "It's hard emotionally and physically. The schooling is difficult, but I know it's for a reason. I know that I wouldn't want my nurse to be it if it was easy for her."

Jackson is in her second semester studies at Spoon River, where 107 students have been admitted to the RN program over the past four years. According to numbers provided by Mike Denum, dean of Career/Technical Education, 85 percent of them completed the program.

At WIU, Director of Nursing Lea Monahan said 30 to 32 students are usually been admitted per class and will only graduate 20 to 24. It's a number, she said, that has "been really consistent."

Jackson said she's seen several classmates drop the program just after one semester. Other students like WIU junior Angela Cooper say they've seen similar amounts of classmates leave.

On Tuesday, Cooper talked about her experience as a first-year RN student amid a break from clinical studies at Heartland Health Care in Macomb.

"It just depends on how much you enjoy the hands-on experiences. This is great," she said motioning to the surrounding long-term care facility. "But it's just so much school work. You have to put up a lot of hours in outside of class and a lot of lab hours. It's a lot harder than I expected it to be going into the program."

Being confronted with an unexpected experience is something that frequently happens, Monahan said, as students realize the academic demand and many wait until it's too late to ask for help.

"Some of them thought they wanted to be a nurse based on what they saw on TV or in a movie and they find out that is not what nursing is," she said. "They're with us for a couple of weeks and then they decide to change their majors."

Shortage of faculty, knowledge

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported tens of thousands of qualified nursing applicants in 2011 were turned away from programs of varying degrees with nearly two-thirds of surveyed nursing schools responding that a faculty shortage was likely the reason.

Indeed, Monahan said the largest causation of the nursing shortage is a lack of instructors. Part of it, she said, may be the salary gap between nursing professionals and faculty with some registered nurses not wanting to take a potential financial cut to teach.

But then again, it could be a multi-faceted issue.

"There's not enough PhD nursing faculty," she said. "The average age of nursing faculty is around 56 or 57, so these people are going to be retiring. We don't have an adequate pipeline to educate them as much as we can as fast as we can."

LeeAnn Young, also a WIU junior who saw her first day of clinical work Tuesday with other RN students at Heartland, said her own experience working as a certified nursing assistant has helped her transition into RN studies.

If nursing schools required applicants to have CNA experience, she said fewer people may drop out within the first year, lessoning the consistent blow to the number of students who become working RNs.

"It kind of gives you a bit of an insight of what you're getting yourself into," Young said. "Also, I think it's good to start from the bottom and work your way up just so you can respect people that work around you."

Additionally, Young said it has seemed like there is a bigger demand for nurses than there are available schools.

Looking ahead

Now that they've successfully completed their first semesters in their respective RN programs, Jackson, Cooper and Young said they have all given some thought to what they'd like to eventually do.

Jackson said she may want to work in geriatrics and with seniors suffering from Alzheimer's, though she's open to other fields. Young hopes to work generally within an area of a hospital and home health down the road.

Cooper said she wants to stay in geriatrics, mental health or both.

"My favorite part has honestly been today, the clinical," Cooper said Tuesday at Heartland. "This is the first time we've actually gotten a patient to interact with one-one-one. It makes me think all the course work I did last semester was sort of worth it to be here."

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